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A MEMOIR 



HENKY C. CAREY. 



Bead before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia, January 5, 1880. 



WILLIAM ELDER 



PHILADELPHIA: 

THE AMEEICAN IKON AND STEEL ASSOCIATION, 

No. 265 South Fourth Street. 

1880. 









Printed by 

ALLEN, LANE & SCOTT, 

No. 233 South Fifth Street, 

Philndelphia. 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



On Monday evening, January 5th, Dr. William Elder, an old Philadelphian, 
but now a resident of Washington City, delivered at the hall of the Historical 
Society of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, a memoir of Henry C. Carey. In 
his lifetime Mr. Carey had committed to his old friend. Dr. Elder, a memoran- 
dum of the leading incidents in his life, including his numerous contributions 
to economic literature and the circumstances which led to theii- preparation. 
This information Mr. Carey desired Dr. Elder to embody in a paper to be given 
to the public after Mr. Carey's death, together with such analysis of his life- 
work in the field of political economy as Dr. Elder, from his perfect familiarity 
with that work, might feel prompted to make. The event which took place at 
the hall of the Historical Society on Monday evening last fully justified the 
wisdom of Mr. Carey's selection of a critic and biographer. The hall was 
crowded with one of the most refined and scholarly audiences ever gathered in 
Philadelphia, and the address with which Dr. Elder for almost two hours en- 
tertained it was a most eloquent, appreciative, exhaustive, and learned tribute 
to the memory of his old friend. That no more fitting selection of a memo- 
rialist could have been made is the general opinion of the many friends of Mr. 
Carey who heard the address. Some of its passages were of classic grace and 
elegance. The memoir is published herewith. 

Among the distinguished gentlemen who were present were General Eobert 
Patterson, the Chairman of the meeting ; Provost Stills, of the University of 
Pennsylvania; Hon. John Welsh, ex-Minister to the Court of St. James; Hon. 
Geo. H. Boker, ex-Minister to Eussia ; Hon. John Scott, ex-United States Sena- 
tor from Pennsylvania ; Hon. William D. Kelley, the Father of the National 
House of Kepresentatives ; John Wm. Wallace, the President of the Histor- 
ical Society ; Frederick Fraley, the President of the National Board of Trade ; 
Hon. Edward McPherson, editor of The Press; Col. Clayton McMichael, 
editor of The North American; William V. McKean, editor of the Public 
Ledger; J. L. Eingwalt, editor of the Baihuay World; Joseph E. Chandler, 
the Nestor of the Philadelphia press ; Judge William S. Peirce ; William and 
John Sellers ; Hon. Thomas Cochran ; Morton McMichael, Jr. ; Walter Mc- 
Michael; Thompson Westcott, the historian; Professor Daniel W. Howard, 
of the Central High School ; Hon. James H. Campbell ; Hon. Charles Gib- 
bons; Henry Carey Baird; Joseph Wharton; Thomas S. Harrison; A. Haller 
Gross; John Jordan, Jr.; Chas. S. Ogden ; Abraham Barker; Cyrus Elder; 
Charles H. Cramp ; George Plummer Smith ; George L. Buzby, Secretary of 
the Philadelphia Board of Trade ; William J. Mullen, the philanthropist ; 
James L. Claghorn, Abraham Hart, and Thomas E. Worrall. Many ladies 
were, present. 

(3) 



A MEMOIR should be a brief biography ; and a biography of a 
protagonist or revolutionist in science involves whatever of the past 
in its history confronted him — how he found and how he left the 
field of his labor ; and the memorialist should have an adequate 
grasp of these conditions and results of the labors deserving record. 

Blackstone says, " There are three points to be considered in the 
construction of all remedial statutes — the old law, the mischief, and 
the remedy." Under an analogous requirement I can not present 
the irruption of such a reformer as Mr. Carey into the domain of 
the study which he cultivated with revolutionary efiect without 
giving a pertinent sketch of its condition when he entered upon it, 
and, at least, an outline of the changes efiected by his labors. 

The state of the so-called science of political economy, as he 
found it, is exceedingly difficult of description, and, for any other 
purpose or to any greater extent than to estimate the task which he 
had before him, is now scarcely worth examining. We have the 
judgment of the most capable critics that no two of its leading 
authorities agreed about anything in the scope, treatment, or issues 
of its subject-matters. A sufficiently accurate classification divides 
them into a set which held it to be an a priori, or deductive, 
science ; while another set, including almost as many varieties as 
individuals, insisted that it falls within the inductive system of rea- 
soning, both as to data and ruling principles : the first suspending 
it upon logical abstractions; the second crowd of cultivators en- 
deavoring to build it up from the facts of observation and experi- 
ment, after the Baconian method of treating purely physical phe- 
nomena. 

John Stuart Mill may be taken to represent the former, saying, 
" It is essentially an abstract science, and its method is the a priori. 
It reasons, and must necessarily reason, upon assumptions, not from 
facts" — a conception, by the way, which has this advantage and 
this only, that the system must have this character if it be a science 
in any proper or philosophical sense of the word, for otherwise it 
can not have a single directory principle uniform, permanent, and 
universal. 

The great body of system-builders with whom we are most fa- 
miliar belong, in a half-and-half sort of way, to this class, if they 
must be classed, for they are so utterly incongruous that they better 

(5) 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



answer Chief Justice Gibson's idea of "a segregated association, 
neither a corporation nor a quasi corporation, but the reproductive 
organ of a perpetual succession ; " or to Lindley Murray's name for 
a negative affirmation, which he styles a "disjunctive conjunction" — 
their prelections, in fact, amounting to a general and special wran- 
gle of contradictions, deserving the descriptive title of the last chap- 
ter of Dr. Johnson's Rcmelas : " Conclusion, in which nothing is 
concluded." 

But, it may be replied, Adam Smith was the father and founder 
of political economy, and his disciples must surely have and hold 
the orthodox faith. Let us see : J. R. McCulloch esteemed Smith's 
Wealth of Nations worthy of comment nearly as close as that given 
to the Bible, yet he objects in his notes to nearly one hundred im- 
portant errors in the text of his author. J. B. Say, who methodized 
this Koran of the faith once delivered to the disciples and gave it its 
general acceptation, declares that it is " an irregular mass of curi- 
ous and original speculations and known demonstrated truths." J. 
S. Mill says, "The Wealth of NatioJis is in many parts obsolete and 
in all imperfect." Stef)hen Colwell thinks J. B. Say far better en- 
titled to claim the paternity of the system, and H. C. Carey, still 
feeling great veneration for his earliest tutor, nevertheless contra- 
dicts him almost as often as he is obliged to cite the leading dog- 
mas of his system, but generally approves its ruling spirit and the 
rebukes he finds provided in it for the departures of its professed 
followers. Of course people who have opinions to maintain and 
propagate must have some standard authority for reference on arti- 
cles of their creed, else how can they be orthodox ? Adam Smith, 
according to Say's version or conversion, answers this purpose well 
enougli ; but it is not fair to the founder of the school to hold him 
responsible for the big debating society which professes to follow 
him. Say, Ricardo, j\Iill, Ba.stiat, and a great batch of college pro- 
fessors and literary drudges have overlaid and left him only a name 
to live. 

I must be allowed to shelter my audacity of disbelief in these 
authorities by confronting them with their peers, their bettei's, and 
not uiil'requcntly with themselves, for this is necessary even to a 
bird's-eye view of Mr. Carey's field or forest of labor when he entered 
upon its cultivation. 

J. B. Say, the real "head and front of the offense," in his Com- 
plete Course of Political Economy, published in 1828, corrects himself, 
and goes back upon his followers, thus: "The object of political 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



economy seems heretofore to have been restricted to the knowledge 
of the laws which govern the production, distribution, and consump- 
tion of wealth, and it is so that I considered it in my treatise pub- 
lished in 1803 ; yet it can be seen in that same work that the science 
pertains to everything in society" — a view, however, which his dis- 
ciples never had of "that same work." Instead, they have reduced 
his whole system to a very limited set of expository and operative 
maxims, to wit : Buy in the cheapest market — Let supply and de- 
mand regulate prices — There can be no over-production — Every 
man is the best judge and manager of his own industrial interests — 
Let international trade be free, and domestic industry take care of 
itself — Obey these laws, these rules, and prosperity will follow, be- 
cause unlimited competition in production and trade is the provi- 
dential harmonizer of all conflicting interests. 

J. R. McCulloch holds political economy to be a science of values. 
Here the statistician is paramount. He is the huckster's oracle, and 
seems to think that figures teach all their meaning and can not lie. 

Archbishop Whately proposed to call it Catallactics, or the sci- 
ence of exchanges. (The feeling of the pocket.) 

J. S. Mill says, "Political economy concerns itself only with such 
phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the 
pursuit of wealth." (The stomach, without bowels or heart.) 

These, and such as these, definitions did not escape without pro- 
test. 

Destutt De Tracy said, the basis of political economy is in man. 
Man should be the aim, and things should be regarded only as his 
ministers. (Some humanity here.) 

Storch thought that the system, to be alive, ought to have a soul. 
(Something of religion added.) 

Joseph Droz held that riches are not an aim but a means. He 
asks sarcastically, " What, is wealth everything and man nothing?" 
adding that, " Some economists speak as if they believed men were 
made for products, not products for men." (Philanthropy invoked.) 

Stephen Colwell, who could not divorce goodness from truth, or 
truth from goodness, would substitute well-being for wealth in the 
definition of a true and worthy economic policy. 

Mr. Carey's opinion and feeling of its proper range and aim can 
not be given in a line or two of definition. But it is in place to add 
here that, as lately as March 25, 1856, he says in a newspaper 
notice of Mr. Colwell's preliminary essay to List's Political Econo- 
my : " The reader can scarcely rise from the perusal without having 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



arrived at an agreement with List that the science remains yet to 
be created." 

A host of eminently capable judges, and among them Daniel 
Webster and Napoleon Bonaparte, might be added to show the in- 
extricable confusion and contradiction among the reigning authori- 
ties in this so-called science when Mr. Carey entered upon his labor 
in this department of study. 

The confusion among the prevalent theorists concerning the prov- 
ince and method of cultivating their field of research was matched 
by an equal uncertainty in the meaning of the terms of art em- 
ployed by the writers in vogue. Archbishop Whately, himself an 
author and thoroughly read in the literature of political economy, 
gives a conspicuous place to this branch of authorship in his chap- 
ter upon Ambiguous Terms. {Elements of Logic, A. D. 1826.) 
Beginning with Adam Smith, he goes through a list of the authori- 
ties, embracing Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say, Mill, McCulloch, 
Torrens, and others known to English readers. In this conglomera- 
tion he exposes as many difierences in the definition and use of the 
terms of art which they all alike employ as there are names in the 
catalogue. He remarks generally of the medley that " the terms of 
art in political economy are only seven — value, wealth, labor, cap- 
ital, rent, wages, and profits ; yet they are seldom carefully defined 
by the writers who use them. Hardly one of them has any settled 
or invariable meaning, and their ambiguities are perpetually over- 
looked." He further adds, " A few only have been noticed of the 
ambiguities which attach to the terms which have been selected, and 
these terms have been fixed upon, not as the most ambiguous, but 
as the most important in political nomenclature." 

Did these system-builders, any better than the architects of the 
tower of Babel, understand each other, or does anybody else under- 
stand them? When one of them calls for brick another under- 
stands mortar ; the plumb-line of a third means trowel to a fourth ; 
one set of them insists that the scaffolding is the building — these 
hang the edifice, a priori, upon the roof, while the other party lay 
its foundation, a posteriori, upon the hard-pan of facts, but make no 
provision for the covering-in of the structure ; they leave the parti- 
tions at cross-purposes, in a labyrinth of incongruities, with the 
stairways always falling short of connecting the stories. 

What a job the innocent student must have had in his endeavor 
to disentangle all this trumpery of theory ! I think I hear him say 
in the style of his later phrase of exclamation, " My heavens ! what 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



does all this mean ? wliat is it wortli ? what is its use ? " He found 
that words were the staple of the teachings ; words that admit of a 
variety of constructions, turned loose upon the world to make their 
way, somehow, everyhow, and anyhow. 

Now let us look at some of Mr. Carey's definitions or tools of 
thought, which he employs in his doctrinal deliverances — not all : 
,that would be to write a complete catechism of the subject. It would 
be of itself a comprehensive treatise upon the thousand and one 
topics which he has handled. 

Distinctive Definitions of Mr. Carey's System. 

Social science treats of man in his efibrts for the maintenance and 
improvement of his condition, and may be defined to be the science 
of the laws which govern man in his eflTorts to secure for himself 
the highest individuality, and the greatest power of association with 
his fellow men. 

Political economy treats of the measures required for so co-ordinat- 
ing the movements of society as to enable the laws of social science 
to take effect. (Here the theory and art are distinguished.) 

Wealth consists in the power to command the services of nature. 
(This happily accords with the meaning of the words weal, well- 
being, welfare.) 

Value is measured by the resistance to be overcome in obtaining 
the service of things required for human use. It is the cost of re- 
production. As the value of commodities declines, the worth of man 
advances. In advancing communities the cost of reproduction con- 
stantly diminishes, and in the ratio of such advancement. 

Utility expresses and measures the service yielded by nature. It 
does not necessarily imply or include cost or value. Instances — 
air, sunshine, social intercourse. The sum of all utilities is wealth. 

Substitution. — Power over nature grows with the substitution of 
improved instrumentalities : from the use of the pack-saddle to the 
railroad-car ; from the canoe to the steamer ; from the poorer to the 
richer soils ; from animal to vegetable products ; from the vegetable 
to the mineral kingdom — at every stage substituting the cheap and 
abundant for the costly and scarce, as this progress is exhibited in 
the steady advancement from the condition of savagism up to the 
highest attained civilization. 

Land. — Its value is ruled by the laws of all commodities. It is 
a machine in its nature, operation, and uses. Its value is wholly due 



10 MEMOIR OF HENEY C. CAEEY. 



to labor. Its alleged "original and indestructible powers" make 
no part of its exchange value. The wealth of a people is indicated 
by the predominance of real estate value over that of personal prop- 
erty. The improvement of fixed property marks the sovereignty 
actually attained, and shows the growth of mind, of social order, and 
of improvement of labor. 

Land and labor, or raw materials and labor, rise in exchange 
value as they are more productive, and in an inverse proportion to 
the price of their finished products. In progressive communities 
labor and land are the only things which rise in value, whilst their 
products as constantly decline in price — labor being understood to 
embrace all physical and mental effort employed in overcoming na- 
ture's resistance. 

Commerce, distinctively, is the exchange of things, services, and 
ideas, by and between the original parties, or hy men with each 
other, with the least possible intervention of intermediaries. 

Trade. — The word should be limited to those exchanges or deal- 
ings in commodities which are carried on by intermediaries or 
middlemen — exchanges made for other persons. It is an instrument 
of commerce. Trade should be allowed only so far as it must be. 
Time and space are the things to be abated, or overcome, in legiti- 
mate commerce. (A sound policy of international business relations 
can be built upon this distinction ; holding steadily in view the 
diverse consequences. It would put an end to industrial domination 
and the reciprocal slavery among civilized peoples who are alike 
capable of industrial independence. Political economy is not a the- 
ory of market values, but it is, or ought to be, a system or theory of 
the productive power of a people.) 

Capital, in ordinary business language, means an accumulation of 
values employed in further production. In the economical sense it 
embraces land, ships, wagons, plows, machinery, clothing, food, 
money, and all tangible subjects of property; and, besides these, 
ideas and credit, which are, as much and even more than material 
substances, necessary and efficient in the production of new values. 
Capital is the instrument by which men acquire the power to direct 
the forces of nature in their service. Capital, in advancing commu- 
nities, grows more rapidly than population. Labor, skilled and 
unskilled, is properly capital. (If tools are capital, why not hands ? 
and it might be properly included in the definition ; but it is usually 
treated rather as an associate than as a component of capital. It is 
a fellow-agent in production, and as co-workers they are by neces- 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 11 



sity married together, for better for worse ; logically, they are one 
bone and one flesh.) 

Productive and unproductive labor. — The theorists, who find 
wealth and capital only in the things that are marketable by 
weight, measure, or number, or other physical properties, are 
much troubled with what they take to be a specific and import- 
ant difference between productive and unproductive labor ; but, if 
wealth be, as it is here defined, man's power over nature, there is 
nothing in the debate, no benefit in the discussion, and no utility in 
its issue, even if it could find one. Whatever power may be exerted 
over matter, in form or place, is production, and, therefore, is pro- 
ductive labor. The agriculturist is no more a producer than the 
miner, the transporter, or the manufacturer. The greater part of the 
agriculturist's products owe all their serviceableness to the labor 
which changes their form and place. A very small portion of them 
is available for use until they are greatly altered by what the phys- 
iocrats are pleased to call the unproductive industries. Mr. Carey 
yields nothing to the landlordism that founds its pre-eminence of 
claims upon the " indestructible powers of land," or upon its exclu- 
sive proc^wciive^ess. Tracing all values to labor, he denies all these 
fanciful but mischievous differences of property rights and rank. 

Mr. Carey has not neglected any topic or title that finds a place 
in the discussions of theory, and he has defined them all with great 
exactitude. The close student of his books will find in them a per- 
sistent, pertinent, central drift toward, and constituting, a summary 
of his doctrines. The subjects, consumption, distribution, wages, 
profit, interest, rent, and the like, are sharply treated ; but there is no 
room for the presentment here. There are, however, many points or 
features of his system which demand such notice as can not be made 
practicable within the brevities of a memoir. I can not here and 
now present the great range of propositions deserving special consid- 
eration, nor can they be arrayed in consecutive order under the 
limitations of this paper ; but they are not inconsequent in them- 
selves. They all rise logically and consistently from the general 
principles which run through and inform the body of his specula- 
tions. Their alterative and corrective action upon the theories 
prevailing when he encountered the accepted authorities I must 
endeavor to exhibit as best I can. Instances : 

Money. — David Hume taught that the greater or less quantity of 
money in use is of no consequence, since the prices of commodities 
are always proportioned to the quantity of this medium of exchange. 



12 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



Adam Smith says, " Money makes a small part of the capital of a 
nation, and always the most unprofitable part of it." J. S. Mill 
speaks to the same purpose, and nearly in the same words, except 
that he does not allow money any place in his definition of capital. 
Bastiat echoes these authors, for he is original in nothing, good or 
bad. Mr. Carey, on the contrary, treats money of every kind in 
use as the great " iostrument of association," and not in any condi- 
tions — in any age or country — the exact equivalent of commodity 
values, or serving only as counters or symbols, or, in the language 
of Smith, " dead capital ;" but, eminently and more than any other 
industrial agent, a producer of values. Mill allows himself to say, 
" Money, as money, satisfies no want, answers no purpose." This i& 
true among wild beasts, but not quite true among wild men. He 
might as well have said, you can not eat a guinea or make an over- 
coat of ten-pound notes. An author can not utter a nothingness in 
the pomp and pretension of a logical formula without serious dam- 
age to the inferences he draws from it. The man who treats the 
money in use as a mere dead multiplier, adder, or subtracter of 
prices will go only the farther into error the more he thinks about 
it. He is just capable of defining capital, as Mill does, to be only 
that portion of material things which is employed in further 
production. A schoolmaster is quite sure that a half dollar will 
buy as much wheat at half price as a dollar will when money is 
twice as plenty, but a thinker will not infer from such an instance 
that a half is, for all purposes, equal to a whole. For the place 
that money holds, and for its functions in commerce and in produc- 
tion, I must refer to Mr. Carey's own pages for explication. 

Currency applies, in common use, to all acceptable kinds of the 
circulating medium. The words money and currency are used re- 
spectively to distinguish the substances of which they consist, paper 
being sometimes the representative and often the substitute for coin ; 
but all these kinds are alike currency, for the reason that things 
which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other in use, 
though they be not identical in substance. There are, besides coins 
and circulating notes, many forms of credit that are money within 
the range of their proper use, serving all the purposes of an ex- 
change medium, and each better than any other in the sphere of 
its greater convenience. Mr. Carey's treatment of this subject au- 
thorizes the foregoing conclusions as being fairly drawn, I think, 
from his published opinions. 

He insists upon making our national currency non-exportable, in 



MEMOIR OP HENRY C. CAREY, 13 



order to escape the disturbances produced by the action of other 
countries, if we adopt gold, for instance, in common with them, as 
the standard in domestic exchanges. 

It does not follow from his doctrine of value that our coined 
money should be bi-metallic, and that silver, without regard to the 
cost of its production, may be forced into equivalence with gold at 
any fixed proportion in weight. His object is to make our currency 
independent of foreign standards. He says, " With a sound national 
system, let foreigners take our gold for whatever balance of trade 
they can impose upon us, having no use among ourselves for any 
coin money except what we can retain under a wholesome foreign 
commerce." " What we most need to-day," he further says, " is the 
establishment of that monetary independence which results from 
maintaining absolute command over the machinery of exchange 
used within our borders, leaving to the gold dollar the performance 
of its duty of arranging for the settlement of balances throughout 
the world." As I understand him, his publications upon this subject, 
made in the last year of his life, have their true explanation in the 
principles here quoted from his earlier works, and all that he has 
written in support of the greenback currency and the remonetiza- 
tion of silver has this bearing and aim, and no other. 

It is something for such a man as Carey to concur so closely as he 
does with Bishop Berkeley, who, 150 years ago, said that "the 
money of a country ought to be non-exportable — that the trade with 
foreign countries should be barter of commodities for commodities." 
Berkeley goes still further, and in the description of a legitimate 
national currency anticipates with wonderful exactness our United 
States and national bank notes. 

Our author's doctrine in respect to banks of issue may be inferred 
from his ideas on money and currency. He says : " The trade in 
money equals the trade in all other commodities combined, because 
it really represents them all." (Clearly he here includes all the 
forms of money of account — all credit money — because coin and 
circulating notes, together, do not cover even a considerable frac- 
tion of the current exchanges.) 

On the subject of governmental interference in the management 
of the banking system, he holds the following language : " Careful 
examination of the systems of Great Britain, France, and the several 
States of the American Union, shows that steadiness and freedom 
march hand in hand together ; that regulation and restriction tend to 
promote accumulations in the hands of bankers to be used for their 



14 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



own profit ; that to the use of their deposits and not to the circulat- 
ing note is due the cause of all the monetary crises of the country; 
and that in the adoption of a system which would cause increase of 
the banking capital, and not to restrictions of the inofiensive bank 
note, are we to look for any improvement in the future." (This 
doctrine was published in 1835, reproduced in his Principles of Polit- 
ical Economy in 1837, and maintained to the latest of his published 
opinions.) 

Upon the unlimited liability of shareholders for the debts of 
these institutions, as early as 1848 an article of Mr. Carey's, in 
Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, was copied and commended by John 
Stuart Mill. This article opposed all responsibility of shareholders 
beyond the amount invested. The recent failure of the Glasgow 
Bank, with the widespread ruin of innocent parties, is an ample 
verification. The argument by the author rests mainly upon the 
equity of the proposition, but derives not a little aid from the fact 
that such unlimited liability prevents solid and prudent men from 
running its risks, and leaves the management to persons who will 
venture anything in a lottery of chances. Mr. Carey found fault 
with our national banking system for holding the shareholders lia- 
ble individually for all debts of the banks to an amount equal to, 
and in addition to, their investments. He very probably had some 
influence upon the introduction in England of the limited liability 
adopted recently in the policy of British corporations. 

Rent — Ricardo, in 1817, published his theory, which fell ac- 
ceptably into the " dismal science " of political economy, of which 
Malthus, McCulloch, and J. S. Mill were the chief apostles : this 
their theory is an a priori philosophy of despair, based upon an 
arithmetic of ruin — an irreligion of science — a denial of all that is 
wise and beneficent in Providence, and of all hope for humanity. 

Eicardo taught that cultivation begins, when land is first open to 
occupation, and population is scarce, with the richest soils, and 
thence of necessity proceeds, with the growth of numbers, steadily 
to poorer and still poorer, until at last all proportion must cease, 
and famine and death relieve the overburdened earth ; the end be- 
ing only postponed, as assassination is said to temper despotism, by 
a graduated massacre, in the forms of war, pestilence, and famine, 
which anticipate by performing the catastrophe in detail ; that is, if 
people did not die prematurely in series adjusted to the overruling 
law they would have to perish at last in the lump. The calculation 
of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, showing that under the 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 15 



natural law of population, unrelieved by his preventive and correct- 
ive checks upon increase, the inhabitants of the earth would in a 
very few centuries stand as thick as herrings in a barrel from the 
surface of the globe to the moon ; and threescore and ten, which 
now limits the individual, would exterminate the whole race. These 
"corrective checks" he prescribes as remedies for the mistake of the 
Creator of men, under and subject to the unfit capabilities of the 
planet to which he has consigned them ! Malthus died so lately as 
1824. McCulloch, who died unrepentant in 1863, follows Ricardo 
and adopts Malthus, in these words : " From the operation of fixed 
and permanent causes, the increasing sterility of the soil is sure, in 
the long run, to overmatch the improvements that occur in agricul- 
ture and machinery." And, last and worst of all, John Stuart Mill, 
claimed to be the philosopher of philanthropy, in his chapter on 
" the law of increase of production from land," published in the 
year of grace 1865, reproduces these horrors in all their hideous- 
ness — the over-population theory of Malthus, and the ever-declin- 
ing productiveness of land of Ricardo and McCulloch ; and he 
assumes them with such simple confidence in their truth as dis- 
penses with any attempt at their demonstration! By the way, 
these four forlorn philosophers were all British born and to the 
manner bred, which helps to show that a dot of an island which a 
tea-cup would cover on an ordinary-sized map of the civilized world, 
and which has no remedy for its own home system but the banish- 
ment of the paupers which it makes, yet undertakes to think for all 
the nations of the earth in matters economical, and to guide and 
govern the policy of all outsiders, is quite too narrow to afford a 
fulcrum for such a lever of Archimedes. 

Mr. Carey met this atrocious theory in 1848 with a demonstration 
of its falsity that has scarcely a parallel in the history of science, 
physical or moral. By an elaborate survey of the settlement and 
progressive cultivation of the United States, Mexico, the West In- 
dies, South America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Greece, India, 
and the Pacific Islands, and, carrying the inquiry down into element- 
ary particulars, and testing the law inferred from the more general 
phenomena, by applying it to the progress of occupation and culti- 
vation of individual farms within the reach of present observation, 
he established the fact, historically, that men invariably commence 
their improvements upon the uplands and thinner and lighter lands, 
and thence descend toward the deeper and richer molds of the val- 
leys and water- courses, as population and wealth, or abundance of 



16 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



labor and excellence of machinery, qualify them for clearing and 
draining the low lands. 

In further corroboration of the law inferred from these facts, and 
in proof that men do not choose to encounter more than their match 
in pioneer enterprise, he cites the fact that the richest lands iu Eu- 
rope and Asia have been abandoned just as the prosperity of the 
people has declined, being compelled by their increasing poverty to 
escape from the rank fertility of the soil, now no longer under their 
control, and take refuge in the poorer lands, which are better graded 
to their enfeebled means of control and culture. Moreover, it is the 
swamps and savannas of the continents that hold the treasured 
riches of the neighboring hills in reserve for human subsistence 
until the force of wealth and numbers shall be able to disinfect and 
subdue them ; just as the mountains are the storehouses of supplies 
of the precious and useful metals, awaiting the times and conditions 
of surrender. 

This doctrine of the occupation of land corresponds exactly to 
the fact that men everywhere begin with the poorest agencies and 
machinery, in tools,- roads, commerce, and trade, and proceed up- 
ward and onward with their advance in numbers and wealth 
through the better toward the best. So down goes the boasted 
theory of rent with all its mischievous consequences in speculative 
science. 

This one achievement of our author would have been enough to 
establish his claim to originality. Mr. Col well says of it : " Mr. 
Carey has effectually refuted the more popular European theories of 
rent. That is a real service to science." This theory of rent has 
inferences not less beneficent than beautiful. They may be traced 
into — 

The law of Distribution of the proceeds of industrial production, 
which follows like a doxology to a hymn of praise. He meets the 
problem of the distribution of wealth with the general proposition 
that there is a law of relation between the quantity of capital and the 
quality of the labor employed — a law connecting every increase and 
every diminution of the former with a corresponding improvement 
or deterioration of the latter ; or, in other words, which have an 
ulterior significance of great importance, marrying the active and 
passive agents of production together " for better for worse." 

This fundamental law he resolves into the following propositions, 
which are either proved by their simplest statement, or are capable 
of easy verification : 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 17 



1st. Labor gains increased productiveness in the proportion that 
capital contributes to its efficiency. 

2d. Every improvement in the efficiency of labor, so gained by 
the aid of capital, is so much increased facility of accumulation. 

3d. The increased power of accumulating capital lessens the 
value in labor of that already existing, bringing it more easily 
within the purchasing power of present labor; because no com- 
modity can command the value of more labor than is required to 
produce a similar thing, or a perfect substitute, at the time of the 
exchange. 

Just here it is to be noted that no existing doctrine of political 
economy recognized among its students meets the requirements of 
the subsisting dispute between labor and capital. None of its au- 
thors attempts to ascertain a ratio of distribution of the results to 
the unlike contributors to the work of conversion of materials into 
forms of use. Curiously enough, even Mr. Carey's law of distribu- 
tion must be classed among final causes or those ends to which the 
providential policy of human agencies tends, but with which the in- 
ductive method will not concern itself, however frequently it is com- 
pelled to resort to it in the dark corners of research. If the system 
has not a maxim or a directory rule or even attempt to interfere in 
the settlement of the respective claims of labor and capital upon 
logical principles — if it can do nothing to compose the great disturb- 
ance which threatens the rights, the property, and the peace of soci- 
ety, it must content itself to dwell in abstractions until it becomes 
fit to enter into actual service, and until then forego the name of 
science, occupy itself with expediencies, and worry its way as best it 
can among contingencies. The British Parliament may settle by 
authority the question of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, but 
it is evidently not a match for the problems of wages, pauperism, 
popular education, currency, or international trade, with a crowd of 
other things of urgent practical importance. 

The authorities, looking for a law of distribution among skilled 
and unskilled laborers, superintendents, inventors, and capitalists, 
have usually dropped down upon the rule of lawlessness, happily 
expressed in the phrase Laissez faire, laissez passer, which means, in 
curbstone English, " Let her rip." They talk vaguely about " supply 
and demand " as a regulator ; or, audaciously, as Bastiat does when 
he ventures to say that "Competition is democratic in its essence; 
the most progressive, the most equalizing, and the most communistic 
of all the provisions to which Providence has confided the direction 



18 MEMOIR OF HENET C. CAREY. 



of human progress." So, so ! the everlasting riot of a divinely au- 
thorized cut-throat strife between capital and labor, and between 
laborers and capitalists among themselves, and against each other, 
is declared to be the providential order of human business affairs, 
that theorists may not be required to find a remedy for the dis- 
order. 

Organized communities settle the questions involved in copartner- 
ship, as such questions are settled in poor-houses and penitentiaries, 
by making arbitrary provision for the prime necessities of life, but 
repressing all aspiration and ambition by denying their incentives. 
Co-operative industrials may determine shares in products by some 
conventiqnal arrangement, but no rule of apportionment of interests 
has ever been produced for the solution of the grand problem of 
equitable distribution in the contributory work of money, heads, 
hearts, and hands. 

Population, or the Law Governing the Increase of the 
Numbers of Mankind. — In the discussion of this subject our 
author adopts the doctrine of Herbert Spencer's dissertation given 
in the Westminster Review for April, 1852, with important addi- 
tional proofs and an extended application, making of it an over- 
whelming refutation of Malthus, Mill, Dr. Chalmers, and the un- 
reflecting notions of common observers, who are prone to think 
their superficial experiences the only test of truth ; not reflecting 
that the supposed disproportion in the provision for human subsist- 
ence to the assumed normal rate of propagation is a direct impeach- 
ment of providential arrangements and adjustments, which occur 
nowhere else in creation. It is remarkable that the school of theo- 
rists which Mr. Carey everywhere opposes, as well on the question of 
population as on all the fundamentals of their philosophizings, oc- 
cupy themselves with the indorsement and decoration of the com- 
mon errors of the ignorant and the unthinking, and so give a sort 
of scientific sanction and sanctity to opinions which a true philoso- 
phy would correct. The perfectly successful solution of this great 
problem, whicli underlies the whole edifice of political economy, 
alike of the false and the true, may be found in his Social Scienee, 
vol. ii., pp. 265-306. 

Emigration. — In 1859, after the publication of his Principles of 
Social Science, he fell upon a new and complementary view of the 
law and history of colonization, perfectly harmonizing with and 
rounding up his doctrine of the occupation of the earth. He an- 
nounced this discovery in a brief letter in the Boston Transcript 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 19 



(November 26, 1859). In substance it contradicts the idea that 
men are individually cosmopolitan, but, on the contrary, are gov- 
erned in their migrations by a distributive impulse which provides 
for the settlement and occupation of all the habitable portions of 
the globe, showing historically that the emigration of peoples is 
ruled by climatic laws, and follows the isothermal lines of their 
several nativities. A demonstration, in facts and figures, was pub- 
lished in Forney's Fress (December 22, 1859). For ease of refer- 
ence, I may be permitted to refer to Questions of the Day, by Will- 
iam Elder, page 331. 

Bishop Berkeley, in his oft-repeated line, " Westward (not north- 
ward nor southward) the course of empire takes its way," states the 
general fact, but he did not know the governing law, or advert to 
its providential purpose. New as the speculation or theory was, it 
passed into instant acceptance with public speakers and journalists, 
and has already fitted itself into common opinion by its ready ex- 
planation of well-known facts, as familiarly as an old acquaintance. 
This subject does not occur in any of his standard publications — it 
occurred to him after they were issued. 

Elementary Harmonies. — The closely interlinked questions of 
population, occupation of land, colonization, theory of rent, progress- 
ive substitution and improvement of the supplies of human life, with 
the overruling law of the distribution of wealth among the several 
classes engaged in the world's work — in all these foundation facts of 
a true theory of the social system Mr. Carey finds unity of interests 
and harmony of tendencies and of ultimate issues where the school 
which he opposes alleged a necessary antagonism between capital 
and labor, and between nature's policy and man's necessities. In 
his revelation of the laws of man and his terrestrial conditions there 
is no curse brooding over every scene of prosperity ; no plagues of 
war, pestilence, and famine in leash, ready to spring upon the prey 
at its boundary point of better fortunes. Instead, we have a sun- 
burst of light and warmth, dispersing the darkness of a mole-eyed 
philosophy, which, like Job sitting in the ashes, scraping his sores 
with a potsherd and railing invectives against Providence, " dark- 
ens counsel by words without knowledge." 

If any one asks, did he, like Enoch, walk with God, or, like Abra- 
ham, was he the friend of God, I must answer that I am not a 
heart-searcher or rein-trier of the living or the dead, but his works 
everywhere justify the ways of God to man, and are all alive with 
love and service to his fellow-men. 



20 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY, 



Unity of Law. — In October, 1872, (the 79th year of his age,) 
he published the last of his works in volume form — an octavo of 
440 pages. He styles the book The Unity of Law, as Exhibited 
in the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental, and Moral Science, 
with the motto, "Variety is unity in perfection." He evidently 
intended this treatise to be a summary of the general results of his 
life's labors. 

All that can be said of the centripetal drift of this work is that 
the striking analogies and obvious coherency of the thousand and 
one established propositions of his studies and discoveries, natur- 
ally enough, betrayed him into the persuasion that they met with 
one consent in a supreme governing principle, which, at least, prom- 
ised a complete organism, a body corporate of demonstrated truths, 
constituting a science of its subjects. But economic phenomena re- 
sult from a multitude of diverse laws, and nothing is gained in 
their study by clustering them into one central conception except 
the manifested harmony of their relations. It is obvious that 
science arises out of principles uniform, universal, and eternal, and 
therefore can not pervade the expediencies which disorder com- 
pels. Absolute law must give way to the contingencies which dis- 
turb its normal operation. The suitable is the available, in the 
spheres of being that have liberty in their movements, until liberty 
resolves itself into order. What are called general principles in the 
theory of human nature are only hudders or cap -sheaves in the 
harvest-gatherings of inquiry. They cover a multitude of distinct 
truths. 

A vice running through the philosophizings of the mass of mod- 
ern inquirers by the inductive system flows from the fact that they 
are all the while endeavoring to apply the method of the orderly 
universe — the obedient material, whose laws are constant and in- 
variable—to departments of mixed material and moral subjects, of 
which the inductive system is utterly incapable, being in its nature 
and powers limited to the category of dead matter and its mechan- 
ics. Lord Bacon was under the strongest temptation to exaggerate 
the method and laws of study with which his great name is uni- 
versally associated, but he took care to warn the world of his disci- 
ples that " the experimental or inductive system of reasoning and 
research must be bounded by religion, else it will be subject to 
deceit and delusion," an opinion well warranted and a caution well 
authorized by the world's experience in politics, jurisprudence, 
metaphysics, and all the social philosophies that have by turns 



MEMOIR OP HENRY C. CAREY. 21 



been tried upon human societies. Most particularly unfortunate 
have been the long list of recluse toilers who have attempted to 
apply the principles of the abstract to the unsettled concrete in 
the affairs of nations, the speculations of the logician to the prob- 
lems of the statesman, which have always resulted in hybridity 
'•nth its consequent infertility. J. B. Say, the methodizer of Adam 
Smith, j&nding and feeling the unfitness of his general principles 
/ for the management of particular interests, failed — that is, avoided 
the treatment of one of the grand divisions of his subject, which 
he calls "public economy or that of a nation," as distinguished 
from his other branch, " international, or political, economy." Mr. 
Carey seems sometimes to think that political economy tends to 
eventuate in a science self-supporting and logically competent to the 
solution of all the problems which stand staring and wondering at 
the history and hopes of man in society ; but whoever will study 
his great work, The Principles of Social Science, will discover that he 
consciously failed to devise a system of political government from 
the totality of the special principles which he had so successfully 
established. His last chapter, the fiftieth of that work, is a virtual 
and, as I happen to know, it was a conscious surrender of the attempt. 
It is made up of aphorisms which have no tendency to settle the 
logical form of civil government. The unity or universality of law 
did not helj) him to resolve the questions of representative govern- 
ment ; the right or duty of government in the matter of popular 
education, its limits and kinds ; the descent of property ; the right 
and limits of governmental jurisdiction in relation to capital and 
labor, or any of the functions assumed by monarchy, aristocracy, 
or democracy. All this for the simple reason that civil government 
is in itself incapable of a scientific order, but is, and must be, guided 
and authorized by established custom and prevailing necessity, and 
is only a system at best, so far as it is even that — a system of expedi- 
encies which must adapt the highest perspective right to the variant 
conditions of society ; that is, it must do the best it can through a 
series of blundering compromises between the absolute right and the 
presently practicable, until the available shall issue in the true — 
until such order in the afiairs of men in society shall be inaugur- 
ated as will take care of itself and need no remedial intervention 
of political government. But, notwithstanding the frequent recur- 
rence of the " unity" or " oneness of law" in his books and in their 
indexes, spoken of as pervading alike the moral, social, and phys- 
ical worlds, an unfavorable construction of these phrases is checked 



22 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



by his own explicit definition and limitation of the idea in applica- 
tion. It will be found in the volume specially devoted to its 
development, at page 124, where he says : " The unity of which 
we speak, as in all other instances in which the idea is used among 
men, is not identity or sameness, but the harmony of correspond- 
ence — unity by relation, fitness, or co-operation, efiected by such 
continuity of character and force of all substances through all 
spheres of being, and all adaptations of use, as alone can constitute 
a universe of the atoms and individualities which it embraces — of 
that one entire system ' whose body nature is, and God the soul.' " 

Our author's works upon detached topics, and published only in 
pamphlet form, deserve more attention in a memoir than to be 
merely inventoried by their titles, but we can give them here only 
the briefest statement of their purport. 

He was constant in his resistance to the repeated attempts to 
saddle the country with ax\. international copyright law. 

In like manner, and on similar grounds of principle and policy, 
he was resolute in resistance and untiring in labor against the 
persistent endeavor of the Free Traders at home and abroad to 
establish what they called reciprocity of trade with Canada, which 
was successful at the earliest agitation of the project in Congress. 
The experience of the effects of the act which established it fully 
justified his hostility to the enactment, and fulfilled his predictions 
of the mischievous one-sidedness of its provisions. It was abrogated 
in 1866 for the very reasons which he urged against its adoption. 

A protracted controversy with the Camden and Amboy Railroad 
monopoly had a triumphant result in a great abatement of the abuses 
complained of 

For instruction of permanent use in the settlement of the questions 
of public policy involved in these discussions, the inquirer must be 
referred to the list of his minor publications given in the appendix 
to this paper. Their perusal, besides the value of their teachings, 
will serve to show that he was ever a watchful and zealous laborer 
for the interests of his country, in good keeping with his just claim 
of chief founder of the new-time system of political economy, which 
of necessity must be American born. 

Newspaper Work. 

Protection. — Between the years 1849 and 1857 he was the virtual 
editor of the New York Tribune in this doctrinal department for 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 23 



which it was then so much distinguished. Afterward Mr. Greeley 
abandoned the policy by his approval and support of the Tariff of 
1857 (which gave us the immediately succeeding commercial revul- 
sion), and totally surrendered it when, in 1872, he was a candidate 
for the Presidency. In Mr. Carey's library there are three large 
. scrap-book volumes filled with his contributions to the Tribune dur- 
ing this period. 

Russian Sympathy. — In 1854, at the beginning of the Crimean 
war, he put the Tribune into the attitude of siding with Russia, 
then laboring under the odium of serfdom, against England and 
France, which had long before abolished the legal form of slavery 
within their dominions. The Northern press generally followed the 
Tribune's lead, to the intense disgust of our British brethren. Mr. 
Carey saw clearly the tendency of the policy of Russia toward the 
emancipation of twenty millions of serfs, and its onward march in 
civilization. He was not blinded by existing conditions, but fairly 
estimated the force of disturbing circumstances. 

The sympathy of Russia thus secured her friendship through the 
great Rebellion of 1861, in strong contrast with the Maximilian 
movement of France in Mexico, and with the aid afforded by our 
brethren of Great Britain to the rebel States in cotton loans, warlike 
supplies, and corsairs for the destruction of our commerce on the 
high seas — a course of conduct which cost us all the risks and mis- 
chiefs of a doubled extension of our civil war. 

During all the years following his adoption of the economic doc- 
trines Avhich distinguish him among its writers, Mr. Carey discussed, 
in the Philadelphia North American and many other journals, the cur- 
rent topics of interest falling within the wide province of his studies. 

Something still remains unnoticed of his public history — much 
more than can be in any wise embraced in this limited narrative. 

In the Constitutional Convention. 

In the autumn of 1872 he took his seat in the Convention of del- 
egates elected by the people and charged with desired reforms of 
the Constitution of the State of Pennsylvania. In this body he en- 
gaged in the debates arising upon the questions of banking, usury, 
corporations, railroads, etc. He published his speeches and reports 
in pamphlet form. They can probably be obtained from H. C. 
Baird & Co., of Philadelphia, who have, also, his standard works on 
sale. This service in the Convention, it will be observed, was ren- 
dered in the 80th year of his age. 



24 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



Public Eecognition. 

Purposely omitting from this over-long memorial the testimo- 
nials of the most competent of his critics, and the numberless trib- 
utes to the worth of his literary work, accorded in the obituary 
notices of his life, labors, and character, which I have found to be 
more appreciative, analytic, and comprehensive than could be rea- 
sonably expected from the busy journalists of the country, I must 
not overlook the Grand Reception given to him on the 27th of 
April, 1859, at the La Pierre House, by the leading business men of 
Philadelphia — manufacturers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, physi- 
cians, and litterateurs, with many gentlemen from other parts of the 
country. 

Closing the enjoyment of the grand banquet provided by the 
committee of arrangements, an appropriate address was made by 
Mayor Henry, and a very happy reply by the honored guest. Then 
followed speeches by Dr. George N. Eckert, Samuel J. Reeves, John 
Tucker, James W. Brown, S. M. Felton, Joseph Harrison, George 
L. Buzby, William D. Lewis, John Bell, of Tennessee, Simon Cam- 
eron^ and William Elder, each treating the topics of industrial pro- 
duction, commerce, and public policy in which they were respectively 
best skilled by their several occupations. The proceedings were 
admirably reported by James E. Harvey, and are well worth read- 
ing, even now, after the interval of twenty years, and all the won- 
derful public events and changes that have marked the history of 
the period. Immediately after this reception in the city, he made, 
upon invitation, an extensive tour through the northeastern counties 
of the State, visiting the principal towns in that wonderfully busy 
and populous region, and in all of them was received by their 
masses of men, employers and employed, who were best fitted by 
their varied pursuits to estimate the practical value of his services 
to the business prosperity which they enjoyed. Neither professional 
politician, popular representative, candidate for public office, pivot 
man of a political party, nor hero other than in the walks of peace, 
he met such a welcome and such a tribute of regard as could not be 
given but to one whose " pen is mightier than the sword." 

Gratuitous Labor. 

It would be hard to give an adequate view of the work done and 
efficiently done in his half century of authorship. Even in quan- 
tity, without estimating his preparatory and informing study, it is 



MEMOIR OF HENRY 0. CAREY. 25 



immense — over and above his thirteen octavo volumes he published 
quite three thousand pages in pamphlet form, and perhaps twice 
that amount in contributions, editorial and over his own signature, 
in the leading newspapers of the time. It is proper to state, and I 
have his own authority for saying, that he never asked nor received 
a farthing in pecuniary compensation for all this miscellaneous 
work, and that his book publications were made at an expense of 
some thousands beyond the receipts from their sales. Milton re- 
ceived twenty pounds sterling for his Paradise Lost. It has paid 
better to the publishers since his death. 

Mr. Carey's Authorship at its Successive Stages. 

Prior to 1835 (his 42d year) he gave but little formal study to 
economic science. He had tacitly accepted the doctrines of the 
Say school as it rendered the doctrines of Adam Smith, for whom 
he ever afterward retained an unreflecting reverence, in the filial 
feeling of honoring your parents without regard to the rightfulness 
of their claims. His associates at the time were all Free Traders ; 
among them were Raguet, Biddle, and Mcllvane. In his maturer 
years he seldom mentions Smith's name but to praise him, and as 
seldom quotes but to contradict him. So first love survives through 
later marriages, and the heart keeps its hold upon the head, no 
matter how much better it knows. So mote it be. In the year 
1835 he met with some lectures delivered at Oxford by Mr. Senior, 
then the chief authority among the economists of Great Britain. 
Thinking that Senior was wholly in error, he published in refutation 
his Essay on the Rate of Wages, with an Examination of the Differ- 
ences in the Condition of the Laboring Population throughout the 
World. 

This was followed by a 12mo. volume entitled The Harmony of 
Nature, which he printed but did not publish, restrained by the 
feeling that he had not yet mastered the system of societary science. 
He learned a great deal more in the composition of this book than 
it could teach, but its central idea is the soul and active spirit of 
all that he has since written. His felt failure in this work made 
him wary, and, setting aside the creeping toddling effort at cobbling 
the received authorities, he commenced the preparation of the Prin- 
ciples of Political Economy in 1837, which he completed in three 
volumes, in 1840. 

In the first volume of this work we have the revelation of his 



26 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



theory of labor value, or labor economized in production, of which 
no less an authority than Professor Ferrara of Turin says : " It ap- 
pears to me that there can not arise a case, in which a man shall 
determine to make an exchange, in which this law will not be found 
to apply." In the second volume, which was first published in 1838 
as a separate treatise, entitled The Credit System in France, Great 
Britain, and the United States, is found his masterly theory of the 
banking system. During this period (1837-40) occurred the greatest 
of all our financial embarrassments, except that of 1820, resulting 
mainly from Henry Clay's compromise tariff of 1833, in which 
universal bankruptcy fell like a storm upon the j)eople, and the 
national credit fell so low that a loan to the Government could 
not be negotiated either at home or abroad. 

Up to this time Mr. Carey had been, as he supposed, a Free 
Trader; but in the closing months of 1842, seeing the wonderful 
change effected by the Protective tariff" then in operation, in confer- 
ence with John C. Calhoun he suggested that there must be some 
great law that would explain the fact that we always grew rich un- 
der Protection, whereas we always ended in bankruptcy under Free 
Trade. A year or two later, as he says, there came to him as with a 
flash of lightning the conviction that the whole Ricardo-Malthusian 
system is an error, and that with it must fall the system of British 
Free Trade. In 1848 his Past, Present, and Future was put into 
print within ninety days of its first conception. That book marks 
an era in the history of political economy, from which it may count 
its A. U. C, its Hegira, or its Declaration of Independence. 

The bread thus cast upon the waters was gathered up by other 
hands after many days. In 1849 Fred. Bastiat published his Har- 
monies Economiques, which was taken bodily, as Professor Ferrara 
reluctantly admits, in " facts, figures, and philosophy," from Carey's 
Principles of 1837, and his Past; Present, and Future of 1848. M. 
Bastiat, nevertheless, called his work A new Exposition of Political 
Economy ! 

Bastiat's writings obtained, rather by their sprightliness than by 
their weight or worth, a temporary success. His own opinions, says 
Professor Cairnes, " are never quoted now except for the purpose of 
refutation." As a joker, he had some originality, and better luck. 
His sometime popular Sophismes Economiques was republished far 
and wide, by a club of New York Free Traders, at the time they 
posted their creed, for the information of the million, in handbill 
form, among advertisements of patent medicines, stray cows, and 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 27 



other such topics of interest, upon board fences and market-houses, 
putting them "wherever they would do the most good." The great 
plagiarist's witticisms, however, soon became dead stock on the hands 
of the propagandists who had unluckily mistaken fun for philoso- 
phy — and that fun, as it happened, very thin and inconsequent. 

Some time in the year 1848 Mr. Carey raised the necessary funds 
for the establishment of The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil, pub- 
lished by Mr. Skinner. For six years he furnished the leading 
articles and many of the minor ones. A selection from these was 
published in 1852, in a volume entitled The Harmony of Interests. 
All along, from the very earliest to the latest of his writings, the 
concurrence of natural, physical, and social laws was the persistent 
drift of his teachings, involving, of course, a constant conflict with 
the doctrines of discord and despair pervading the school of Mal- 
thus, Say, and Ricardo, and their more distinguished followers. 
Hence the controversial character of his staple productions. 

Anti-Slavery. — In 1853, prompted by Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom 
and the English enthusiasm which it excited on the subject of 
American slavery, he wrote his Slave Trade ; ivhy it Exists, and how 
it may be Extinguished ; having in part for its object the checking of 
the exultation of the Lady-Sunderland self-glorification club in the 
contrasted freedom of England from the reproach of negro bondage, 
but chiefly making a terrible exposition of the fact that an equally 
severe, or even worse, form of slavery existed in that part of the 
world which prides itself upon its advanced civilization and Chris- 
tianity — particularly insisting upon the evidence afibrded by the 
English rule of Ireland, and the pauperism and social degradation 
inflicted upon its subjects at home, and upon its dependencies 
abroad, where its governing policy has its legitimate effects ; showing, 
by a fearful array of facts, that bondage, under the euphuisms which 
are made to cover its various forms, is none the less malignant in 
essence for its diflferences of method and operation. For our South- 
ern system he had as strong an abhorrence as the most rabid of the 
Abolitionists, and for many a reason besides those popularly alleged 
against it. Work without wages, and with the deprivation of social 
and political liberty, seemed to him but a shade of the policy that 
offers nominal freedom but withholds its practical benefits. He 
allowed to the chattel slavery of the South its just claim against 
European oppression of the poor, that it did not induce famine, 
pestilence, or exile upon the millions of its subjects ; but he conceded 
neither toleration nor respect to the invariable accompaniment of 



28 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



the spirit of masterdom — its boasted chivalry, which is but the wild- 
beast phase of human character, and having all the odious features 
that mark the reign of caste, though limited in our case by the color 
and descent of its victims. 

The general propositions of Mr. Carey's system are capable of a 
thousand theoretical and practical applications, and they abound in 
the discussion of special topics. It is quite impossible to exhibit 
these stores of informing and directory thought in any less compass 
than a complete abridgment or condensation, to be effected by 
changing their controversial character and tone into a simple didac- 
tic style and form. That his books have not been more extensively 
used in schools as text-books is owing entirely to their structure 
being more polemical than arbitrary. The authoritative dogmas of 
a system of opinions, however fortified and conclusive, must be ex- 
tracted, for common use, from the disputation involved. The works 
of the protagonists in science are usually subject to these conditions. 
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations could not be made a common study 
until J. B. Say methodized and re-formed it ; and the original has 
never been read since the ^publication of its interjDretation. Miss 
McKean's Manual of Carey's Social Science is not so much an ex- 
tract of the essence as a contraction of the text. The work was 
done under the author's supervision, and, therefore, is marked by 
his own method and manner. His books, however, are admirably 
fitted for the consideration of disciplined inquirers. They have been 
published in the following languages : English, French, German, 
Italian, Swedish, Eussian, Magyar, Japanese, and Portuguese — not 
all, but the chief of them are translated into this extensive variety 
of foreign tongues, and the savants of every civilized people have 
been made more or less familiar with them. 

The general — almost total — antagonism of his doctrines to those 
of the authorities of English Europe has hitherto hindered their 
general acceptance there. Bacon, in his last will, left his system of 
physics "to the world after some generations shall be past;" and 
Carey's disciples must wait till opinion, by its inherent authority, 
shall in good time displace the logic of words which do not repre- 
sent things. At home many of his views have secured signal tri- 
umphs, and they are all more generally diffused than noted as be- 
longing to him. Mr. Colwell can not be called a disciple. He 
stands apart from the class of followers, while he concurs in the 
main with Carey in the issue of their common studies and achieve- 
ments. Frederic List may claim as much independence, having 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 29 



written earlier than Carey or Colwell. The general agreement of 
these three eminent co-workers shows how original thinkers, start- 
ing from different points, meet in corroborative results, and so con- 
firm each other better than the mere acceptance of followers can do. 

Mental Qualities and Method in his Authorship. 

In his earlier works he superabounds in statistics. He was apt 
in the study, industrious in the pursuit, and methodical in the pres- 
entation of results. His cipherings are clear demonstrations of the 
propositions for which they are employed. His arithmetical data 
are entirely reliable. He had figures at his finger ends. In the 
rapidest flow of conversation he was safe in very complicated cal- 
culations — a faculty by no means common even among those au- 
thors who need it most. 

Induction, ever induction, rapidly and safely evolved, was the 
prevailing character of his reasonings, whether extemporized or con- 
trolled by the restraints of written composition. He felt analogies 
strongly, but his course of thought was rigidly in the sequences of 
cause and effect. He gave to metaphysics the highest place in his 
estimate of the rank of the sciences, but, I think, rather as a staid 
logical understanding overvalues wit. He had a quite sufficient 
acquaintance with the numberless books on the subjects of his study, 
but gave little heed to their elaborate abstractions. In framing his 
definitions of the terms of art, and in stating their corollaries and 
practical applications, nothing finer or more critically exact can be 
found than in the aphorisms which abound in all his greater works. 
While full to completeness, his inductions are all alive with theo- 
retic correspondences. Take, for instances, the maxims appended to 
the several chapters of his Past, Present, and Future, and the fre- 
quently-recurring morals of his leading propositions elsewhere. 
They have the quality, and almost the form, of a systematic cate- 
chism, and the still better thing in them is the wholesomeness of 
the moral and religious feelings which they awaken. Notwithstand- 
ing his avoidance of j)oetical analogies and ad captandum phrases, 
his style and diction are often lifted by the inherent beauty of the 
thought into the form of prose poetry. I am, however, inclined to 
believe that he never allowed his ideas to dance fandangos in the 
hand-cuifs and hopples of verse. There are many instances of 
rhythm in his English, but he never tortured words upon the rack 
of rhyme. 



30 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



I speak from a suflBcient acquaintance with the workings of his 
mind in its later and maturer movements. He preserved to the last 
a free spirit of inquiry, in some instances frankly reversing previous 
commitments, and still more frequently modifying and extending 
theoretic propositions. Some of these have been cited by sciolists 
of reputation in political economy — men who could not afford to 
learn or unlearn anything after they began to teach everything ; 
but these inconsistencies will be accepted as the strongest proof of 
his mental integrity by those who know that a real thinker is always 
a learner, and is always manly enough to put away childish thiugs. 
I recollect, with some mortification, that William Cullen Bryant 
answered Mr. Carey's later doctrines upon international commerce 
by referring him, in refutation, to his published opinions of, say, 
twenty years before. Mr. Carey did not think that the consistency 
of self-conceit is better and worthier than the |)ersistency of ear- 
nest inquiry and corrective discovery. 

Protection. — The populace know but little of our author be- 
sides his rigid, devoted, and uncompromising advocacy of the Pro- 
tective or defensive policy in international trade. In the darkest 
day of its varied history he was its stalwart champion ; and through 
good and evil fortunes he stood firm in expectancy, till at last his 
highest hopes were crowned with a well and hardly earned success, 
which has vindicated itself by answering all his prophecies. 

He was a philosopher whose studies were limited to no time or 
clime, nor did he ever yield principles to temporary contingencies ; 
but he was, also, an American and a patriot, and no further a cos- 
mopolitan than as the prosperity of every particular people is a 
constituent and auxiliary of the welfare of every other, or as the 
general good is reflected upon the fortunes of each nationality in 
the ratio of the aptitude of its own conditions, under the convic- 
tion that true philanthropy graduates its activities in direct rays on 
the nearest interests, and diffuses its force as the sun gives its heat 
collaterally to the latitudes which lie more remote from the ecliptic. 
The student who would explore this great question is referred for 
direction to the index of his Social Science ; he will find the guide 
to its specific discussion there, and will meet it incidentally every- 
where else in the relations of its vast range of influence upon other 
questions of domestic and foreign policy. 

Growing out of this dominant principle, which pervades his 
policy of national government, his passionate hostility to the 
British system of foreign trade, and to the subsidiary British sci- 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 31 



ence of political economy, takes something of the temper and tone 
of a national prejudice. He was not a compromiser of opinions ; 
he served and maintained the truth of his convictions without 
the cunning or timidity of a self-seeking popularity-hunter ; and 
accordingly he did not repress indignation at the wrongs inflicted 
and the miseries endured under a system of monstrous domination 
over the industrial and commercial interests of a country rela- 
tively the younger, and only for that reason the weaker, in the war 
waged against its dearest rights. His governing feeling in this con- 
troversy was not hatred but horror. The symbol of criminal law is 
a blinded woman^ balancing law against crime, with a suspended 
sword, looking like vengeance, but intending only the protective 
judgment of justice. Once the Prince of Peace, who came not to 
destroy but to save his enemies, "looked round in anger upon 
them, being grieved for the hardness and blindness of their hearts." 
(Mark iii. 5.) I may say, without irreverence, of Carey's vehemence 
of denunciation, that " the very head and front of his offending 
hath this extent — no more." 

The titles of his book and pamphlet publications in chronolog- 
ical order will be found in the appendix to this paper. 

Personal History. 

Somewhere I must break away from the endeavored presentment 
of the Author, and enter upon the history of the Man. 

Henry Charles Carey was born in Philadelphia, on the 15th of 
December, 1793, and died there early in the morning of the 13th of 
October, 1879, having nearly completed his 86th year. 

His father, Mathew Carey, was an Irish patriot, and, in effect, a 
political exile from the land of his birth. Something hereditary 
may be detected running, with much of the pristine force of blood, 
through the life and character of the son. Mathew Carey was an 
ardent and fertile, but irregular, laborer in the field of societary 
science which his son was destined to enlarge, advance, and illus- 
trate by a half century of successful endeavor. From the age of 
early boyhood Henry C. was a bookseller and publisher for upward 
of twenty years. When he was but twelve years old his father sent 
him to take the superintending charge of a branch establishment in 
Baltimore. His business letters home during the year of his engage- 
ment there are preserved by the family as a fond memorial and a 
sure indication of the faculty afterward developed. At this time 



32 MEMOIR OF HENEY C. CAREY. 



he was known in the trade by the title of the " Miniature Book- 
seller." In the summer of 1812, in his nineteenth year, he went 
south as far as Kaleigh, North Carolina, on this business. In the 
year 1824 he instituted the still extant system of book-trade 
sales. He had been a partner in the business with his father from 
the year 1814. In 1821 his father retired from the firm, and 
Henry C. became the leading partner in the company of Carey 
& Lea, in their time the largest publishing house in America. 
The business Avas subsequently continued under the name of 
Carey, Lea & Carey, and finally under that of Carey & Hart. 
He was for the most part the reader of the works selected for 
publication and republication throughout the period of his part- 
nership in these several concerns. In 1835 he retired from the 
business, which had been largely prosperous and profitable under 
his direction, after about twenty-three years of active occupation 
in it. 

In this assiduous study of books he obtained his efiective educa- 
tion, with little aid from other tutors. Of his subsequent business 
enterprises I can not and need not speak. In his last will he felt 
himself able to make liberal bequests to members of his family, con- 
sisting of an adopted daughter, nephew, nieces, and other relatives, 
to personal friends, and to public institutions. He gave his library 
to the Pennsylvania University, as Mr. Colwell had previously done 
with his rich collection of economic works. 

In 1819 he married a sister of the distinguished painter Charles 
E.. Leslie, and in 1825 visited Europe, accompanied by his wife and 
his own sister. He made the tour of Europe again in 1857 and 
1859, occupying about half a year in each of these visits. In one 
or other of these visits he made the personal acquaintance of John 
Stuart Mill ; Count Cavour, of Italy ; Count Sclopis, President of 
the Geneva Congress; Professor Bergfalk, of Sweden, reviser of 
the laws of the Kingdom ; and a number of the leading publicists 
and scientists best known to fame — among them, Humboldt, Lie- 
big, Chevalier, and Ferrara, and held frequent correspondence, by 
letter and courteou.s exchange of publications, with the most of 
them, and saw them at his own residence in Philadelphia as often 
as these scientists, journalists, and distinguished authors of Europe 
visited this country. 

Mr. Carey had an imposing form, about five feet ten inches in 
height, and an average weight of 160 pounds; his resemblance to 
the familiar portrait of Alexander Humboldt was remarkable. His 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 33 



black eyes, for beauty and geniality of expression, had scarcely a 
parallel. Everything in his face and in his address indicated the 
warmth and urgency of his social proclivities. He was as much a 
club man as he was a student and author. He was an efficient pro- 
moter and active associate in the movements of the society men of 
the city. The drama, the opera, and literary associations, all 
through his life, had the fullest advantage of his money and his 
active aid. He was a member and supporter of all the voluntary 
associations organized for worthy purposes, and he was prominent 
among the men who periodically gathered their friends and ac- 
quaintances together in festive entertainments. For such festivals 
Philadelphia has long been famous, and they are well worthy of 
notice in the biographies of the men who maintained them. In 
these assemblages might be met the representative men of the city. 
A list of their names would be a directory of the best-known people 
engaged in forwarding the public interests, advancing the character, 
and governing the affairs of the community. In these grand gath- 
erings visiting foreigners of worth and distinction were well repre- 
sented, affording the guests the opportunity of seeing so much of the 
world without traveling over it. An abiding impression made by 
these stated reunions upon an observer was the remarkable mixture 
of the oldest men of note with the youngest men of promise, whom 
the entertainer's social influence brought together, and the cordi- 
ality and amenity which he diffused among them all. 

Of the many clubs of which he was a member, there was one 
limited in number to twelve persons. It was established many 
years ago. They dined together once a year. For several years 
past he dined alone on the day appointed, for " auld lang syne." 

His more immediate and intimate personal friends met him at 
his round table once a week. These meetings were known as " The 
Carey Vespers." They were punctually held, and were generally 
employed in the consideration of the public affairs of the eventful 
years which led to, filled up, and followed the great rebellion — the 
war of arms which so severely tried the nation's strength, its induce- 
ments, and its sequences. There were able men in that select com- 
pany, and its free discussions gave effective force, through them, to 
outside agencies in the formation of the public judgment and result- 
ing action. It would be safe to say that every important question 
of opinion and conduct affecting the general weal was earnestly 
arbitrated there, as it pressed for examination. Its conferences 
seemed to be indispensable to its members. For some of them 



34 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



their agency in the world's work ceased before the departure of 
its chief, and now the circle's " silver cord is loosed, the golden 
bowl is broken, the pitcher is broken at the fountain, the wheel is 
broken at the cistern, and the mourners go about the streets," The 
hand of time lies heavy upon its survivors. One year ago the sum 
of the ages of four of these gentlemen — Mr. Carey, General Patter- 
son, William D, Lewis, and Joseph R, Chandler — reached a total of 
351 years, and the others that still remain are but little younger. 
They well remember ! 

In the conduct of smaller circles and promiscuous pleasure par- 
ties he did not shine as a conversationist. The habit of his severe 
studies, and the tone of their earnestness, attached even to his com- 
mon talk, and he usually spoke without any accommodating reserve, 
or special regard for opposing opinions or lack of opinions, in what- 
ever company he encountered ; yet he was too kind and courteous 
to give offense. In tone he was often dogmatic or at least didactic ; 
but he was not rudely arbitrary in debate. There was in fact an un- 
usual mixture of the positive and the respectful in his manner of dis- 
cussion ; just as his writings, which are so largely controversial in 
matter, are never arbitrary in assertion, however positive in opinion. 
He could not think, nor feel, nor speak, nor write with a half-hearted 
earnestness or hesitation of the things which he most assuredly be- 
lieved ; but he could listen, suppressing his constitutional impa- 
tience, to the doubts of others, and give due force to their differences 
of information and opinion when they had any. His earnestness, 
however, was so much against conversational tact. He sometimes 
clinched his deliverances with expletives and epithets something out 
of fashion in society, but the gleaming cordiality of his fine black 
eyes, and the pleasantness of his voice and handsome countenance 
smoothed to acceptance the harshest form of words that he indulged. 
He lacked humor of a juicy Irish quality, which he ought to have 
inherited from some ancestor of the sod earlier than his father, and 
he never made a pun. It was only the stronger and more immedi- 
ate relations of thought that secured his attention. His smile was 
ever fresh and genial ; his laughter only semi-occasional, and when 
it broke from him one could see that he was not a joker or much 
given to the entertainment of fun. Fun — there is a kind of it to 
which he was a stranger : his conversation, alike in its most formal 
mode and the chattiness of easy familiarity, was always purely 
chaste in subjects and utterances, as if in a felt presence of woman- 
hood. In good keeping with this ruling sentiment, he was in social 



MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 35 



intercourse attentive to the claims of women, not punctilious but 
punctually attentive, and respectful without mannerism or any of 
the little conventional hypocrisies of the prevailing etiquette. He 
had thought so much and had written so earnestly upon the real 
interests of the sex that he seemed to carry with him into their so- 
ciety the sympathies and aspirations which arose naturally out of 
his favorite studies. 

Notwithstanding the amazing amount of his work, he was not a 
literary drudge. He wrote under impulse, rapidly, almost furiously ; 
witness his chirography, which is hard to read, though much alle- 
viated by neatness, uniform length of words, correct spelling, and 
careful punctuation. He never took exercise for its own sake. 
When tired with the posture at his writing-table, he walked the 
spacious rooms of his study, library, and large collection of paintings, 
keeping up the current of his head-work and soon returning to his 
swiftly-flying pen. 

His mental processes were impetuous, but free from the confusion 
of hurry, though rather embarrassing to his readers by the profu- 
sion of argument and illustration. If he had written his principal 
works in French, of which he was a master, they would have gained 
a desirable compactness by relief from the over-opulence of his 
vernacular in composition. 

Among the reliefs and luxuries of his leisure hours he read more 
light literature, novels, and periodicals than any other man, I think, 
who does anything else. He doubtless enjoyed but he never quoted 
them in his books or conversation, and it would be hard to find in 
his multitudinous productions a verse of poetry, other than a few 
homely adages of practical wisdom, often embodied in rude rhyme. 

His general health was excellent. He had no chronic ailments, 
and up to his 80th year he never, knew what it was to have a head- 
ache, or an attack of indigestion. He bore admirably what other 
men, of any age, would have found fatiguing. He had no damag- 
ing habits. He took snuff very moderately. He drank light wine 
at table with his guests. He was a gentleman of the olden time — 
although prudently cautious, he was not fastidious in diet. 

Five or six months before the closing scene, declining strength 
and troublesome but not painful ailments, without corresponding 
decline of mentah health, gave signs, which he fully understood, that 
the end was rapidly approaching. His sight was slightly affected, 
but his other senses retained their ordinary acuteness, and his intel- 
lectual energy continued to animate and to serve him for continuous 



36 MEMOIR OF HENRY C. CAREY. 



though somewhat abated labor in his life-work— witness his con- 
tributions to the Penn Monthly in his last year, and his unintermit- 
ting correspondence with his friends to the last. Only five days be- 
fore his death Dr. S. Austin Allibone received from him an article 
on the use of the word fortnight and its synonyms in several lan- 
guages and varied uses, which was marked by clearness, pertinency, 
and niceness of verbal distinctions worthy of the divertisements 
of leisure in his best days ; and, with his habitual observance of the 
amenities of social life, he continued to visit and receive his friends 
to within two weeks of his departure. His death was not prema- 
ture, nor was it surprising either to himself or to those nearest to 
him ; but at the last it was, in some sense, sudden. He was spared 
the helplessness of protracted illness. Gently, tranquilly, he passed 
into his last sleep. 



APPENDIX. 



LIST OF THE BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS WEITTEN BY 
HENEY C. CAEEY. 



Books. yeak 

Essay on the Rate of Wages 1835 

Harmony of Nature (printed but not published) 1836 

Principles of Political Economy (3 vols.) , 1837-38-40 

The Past, the Present, and the Future 1848 

Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial 1860 

Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign , 1853 

Principles of Social Science (3 vols.) ^. 1858-59 

Manual of Social Science (edited by Miss McKean) 1864 

The Unity of Law ; as exhibited in the relations of Physical, Social, Mental, 
and Moral Science 1872 

Concurrently with the production of these volumes, and continuously since 
the date of the last of them, Mr. Carey was engaged in the discussion of the 
various topics of general concern falling within the range of political economy, 
in newspaper articles, which would make many volumes if collected in that 
form. Those of his works to which he has given the pamphlet form are named 
in the following list. 

Pamphlets. yeab 

The Credit System in France, Great Britain, and the United States (pp. 130) 1838 
This subject was subsequently still further treated in a magazine published 

in New York, to the extent of over 100 pp 1838-39 

Answers to the Questions, " What Constitutes Currency ; what are the Causes 

of Unsteadiness of the Currency J and what is the Remedy ?" (pp.81) 1840 

Commercial Associations of France and England (pp. 40) 1845 

What Constitutes real Freedom of Trade (pp. 53) 1850 

What the North Desires (pp. 8) 1850 

Two Diseases raging in the Union — Anti-Slavery and Pro-Slavery (pp. 11)... 1850 
The Prospect, Agricultural, Manufacturing, Commercial, and Financial, at 

the Opening of the Year 1851 (pp. 84) 1851 

How to Increase Competition for the Purchase of Labor and How to Raise 

the Wages of Labor (pp. 16) 1852 

Two Letters to a Cotton Planter (pp. 27) .' 1852 

Ireland's Miseries and their Cause (pp.16) , 1852 

The Working of British Free Trade (pp. 52) 1852 

British Free Trade in Ireland (pp. 16) 1852 

(37) 



38 APPENDIX. 



ki-^ 



YEAE 

Letter to a Farmer of Ohio (pp. 16) 1852 

Three Letters to Hon. R. M. T. Hunter, U. S. S. (pp. 42) 1852 

The Present Commercial Policy of the Country (pp. 10) 1852 

Letters on International Copyright (pp. 72) 1853 

Second Edition (pp. 88) 1868 

The North and the South (pp.40) 1854 

Coal, its Producers and Consumers (pp. 19) 1854 

American Labor «;s. British Free Trade (pp. 48) 1855 

The True Policy of the South (pp. 15) 1855 

Present Situation and Fiiture Prospects of American Railroads (pp. 8) 1855 

Money. A Lecture before the American Geographical and Statistical 

Society 1856 

Letters to the President, on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the Union, 
and its Effects as Exhibited in the Condition of the People and the 

State (pp. 171) 1858 

Financial Crises, their Causes and Effects. Letters to William C. Bryant 

(pp.58) 1860 

The French and American Tariffs Compared (pj). 29) 1861 

The American Civil War (pp. 23) 1861 

The Way to Outdo England without Fighting her. Letters to Hon. Schuyler 
Colfax on the Paper, the Iron, the Farmer's, the Railroad, and the Cur- 
rency Questions (pp. 165) 1865 

The Public Dek, Local and National (pp. 16) 1866 

Contraction or Expansion ; Repudiation or Resumption (pp.47) 1866 

Resources of the Union. A Lecture before the American Geographical and 

Statistical Society (jDp. 26) 1866 

The National Bank Amendment Bill (pp. 8) 1866 

Reconstruction — Industrial, Financial, and Political (pp. 79) 1867 

Review of the Decade 1857-1867 (pp. 40) 1867 

The Finance Minister, the Cm-rency, and the Public Debt (pp. 40) 1868 

Resumption; how it may be Profitably Brought About (pp.16) 1869 

Shall we have Peace ? Peace Financial and Peace Political (pp. 66) 1869 

Review of the Report of the Hon. David A. Wells, Special Commissioner of 

the Revenue (pp. 66) 1869 

Our Future (pp. 7) 1869 

Review of the Farmer's Question (pp. 12) 1870 

Wealth — of what does it Consist (pp, 11) 1870 

Memoir of Stephen Colwell (pp. 35) 1871 

The International Copyright Question considered (pp. 30) 1872 

The Rate of Interest and its Influence on the Relations of Capital and 

Labor. Speech in the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention (pp. 22)... 1873 
Capital and Labor. Report of Committee on Industrial Interests and La- 
bor in the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention (pp. 31) 1873 

Currency Inflation. How it has been Produced, and how it may be Profit- 
ably Reduced, liters to Hon. B. H. Bristow, Secretary of the Treasury 

. (pp. 20)... ...A...^^ 1874 

The Br^sh^Preftfes of 1871 and 1874 (pp. 38) 1874 

"l^y independence. Letter to Hon. Moses W. Field (pp. 12) 1875 

late Finance Bill (pp. 12) 1875 

Canufactures— At once an Evidence and a Measure of Civilization (pp. 7)... 1875 
To the Friends of the Union Throughout the Union (pp. 4) 1876 



M^nvifact 



APPENDIX, 39 



YEAR 
Appreciation of the Price of Gold. Evidence before the U. S. Monetary- 
Commission (pp. 16) - 1876 

Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization versus British Free Trade. Letters 

in reply to the London Times (pp. 36) 1876 

The Three Most Prosperous Countries in the World (p. 2) 1877 

Eesumption — When and How will it End ? (pp. 12) 1877 

Repudiation — Past, Present, and Future (jDp. 43) 1879 

Of these pamphlets a selection in one volume, 8vo., and another in 2 vols., 
8vo., both entitled lliscellaneous Works, as well as a third, in one vohime, 8vo., en- 
titled llisceUaneous Papers on the National Finances, the Currency, and other 
Economic Subjects, have been published by H. C. Baird & Co., Industrial Pub- 
lishers, Philadelphia. 

In that portion of Mr. Carey's library bequeathed to the University of Penn- 
sylvania there are three large scrai^-book volumes of his contributions to the 
editorial columns of the New York Tribune, from 1850 to 1856. An examination 
of these papers shows that he was, through this period, the Protectionist editor 
of the Tribune. 

Quite three thousand pages of pamphlets were published by him, and from 
1848 to 1852 he contributed monthly and often very extended and elaborate 
articles, requiring much research, to The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil, which 
was established largely through his iniiuence, and was published in Philadelphia 
by his friend and early and ardent disciple, the late John S. Skinner. He wrote, 
besides, almost constantly for the Philadelphia North American, of his friend 
Morton McMichael, and a great many articles for other pai^erg. His strictures 
on railroad monopoly during 1848-50 would make two large 8vo. volumes. 











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